The Other Side of the Mirror
by Faeline
Summary: Collection of vignettes and drabbles. "Alice stares down at the broken body of the Moon; this is one ordeal the Champion was not prepared for."
1. On the Sea

**AN: **These drabbles were concocted using the Music Meme, which says: "Choose a fandom and character/characters. Put your music player on shuffle. Write a separate story for each song that plays, stopping as soon as the song ends." The goals is to write for 10 songs, but I usually shake it up.

* * *

><p><strong>Song:<strong> Crazy For You – Madonna

**_Can't you feel the weight of my stare  
>You're so close but still a world away<em>**

She's come to know well the early hours of morning. Those dark hours where it seems you are the only person left in the world. On the sea. Hours that make you feel small, as if you've drank much too much Pishsalver.

Sleep has had trouble finding her, since her return from Underland nearly a year ago. She blames it on her never-still location, the incessant rocking of the ship that drives her from her bed to sit before the mirror affixed to her cabin wall, staring into it as if it might hold the answer to her sleepless nights.

And perhaps, she thinks, blinking as she watches the image unfold before her, the Hatter's hands moving deftly over a bolt of blue silk—thimbled fingers carefully marking, measuring, cutting and stitching—it does.

* * *

><p><strong>Song:<strong> Ray of Light – Madonna

**_She's got herself a universe gone quickly  
>For the call of thunder threatens everyone<em>**

They are not two evenings from the last port when the storm hits them.

She has never seen a storm such as this. It eclipses the moon, disappears the stars, makes the world go black.

The last thing she hears before the waves cover her head is a thundering crash, the unmistakable pistol-crack of breaking wood and the captain's voice shouting over the din.

When she surfaces, the sea has swallowed everyone. And she is alone, floating on the back of what was once the captain's cabin door, the rain beating down on her head, stinging her eyes. But that doesn't matter, because she can't see anyway.

All around her is dark. Dark swells. Dark clouds. Not even a flash of lightning to brighten the way.

Her fingers, chilled to the bone, lose their grip on the cabin door and she slips beneath the waves. The dark grows deeper. Her head feels strange, too big and too small all at once.

She opens her eyes; they blur and sting with the brine. But! There is something there. Just in front of her. A smear of a glow, like flame behind oily glass. And it's coming closer.

She reaches out; her fingers brush smooth glass, find a wooden frame of worked roses and vines. The mirror from her cabin.

What fortune that she should just so happen to find it here in the depths of all things dark and ending. And she hopes it is not merely her mind playing tricks on her when her arm slips through the glass, up to her elbow, and warm fingers tangle around her own, gripping…grasping…_tugging_.


	2. Choosing the Path

**_There is no other road  
>We'll have to wait before we go<br>So let the heat come in  
>Where you end<br>I begin_**

_"Forever May You Run" _– Gavin Rossdale

* * *

><p>"Don't you remember what I told you?"<p>

She sees the thoughts spinning behind his eyes.

"The night after I first came back. …Again."

"Heartberry tarts," he murmurs and she blinks and tilts her head, a smile curling at the corner of her mouth as she remembers the lush flavor of the tarts, the explosion of sweet juice across her tongue….how she'd beguiled Hatter to try one, even gone so far as to feed a piece to him. And the look on Thackery's face once he'd realized what had just occurred at his very tea table. A relationship sealed with the offering of a morsel, the warmth of breath and the soft brush of lips against her fingers.

Tarrant looks at her then, eyes burning green and says, "You make the path."

"That's right," Alice says. "I've always thought it rather inappropriate to sit back and make Fate do all the work."

"It does seem a trifle lazy."

"And this," she says, picking up his hand, winding her fingers through his own, caressing perfect imperfections—hardness of a callous, rough edge of split skin—"is the path I choose."


	3. Shoot the Moon

**AN:** Another short one, spurred by the song meme.

**Song:** Shoot the Moon - Norah Jones

* * *

><p><strong><em>"Shoot the Moon"<em>**

* * *

><p>"What happened?" Alice finds herself resisting the urge to place her hands on her hips and scold the Tweedles and Mally like errant children.<p>

"We didn't mean for it—"

"That is to say, we didn't intend—"

"They shot an arrow into the moon," Mally says from her perch atop a nearby rock, where she is staring down at the jagged pieces of silver that once hung bright and huge in the night sky.

"How was we to know—"

"The Moon's so rarely out during the day—"

"Must've been curious as to the game we was playing…"

"Or who was playing with us…" Mally mutters.

Alice stares down at the broken body of the Moon; this is one ordeal the Champion was not prepared for.

"Ah, 'tis nothing a stitch and a prayer won't fix," says the Hatter, scooping up the pieces with care.

Later that night, as the Moon beams down at them, they discover patterns in the purple stitching Tarrant has carefully and artfully applied.


End file.
